A Presidential Appearance

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In the back office of my bookstore, folks are already abuzz about this year’s Book Expo in Chicago. Book Expo is probably the largest publishing convention in the world, but if you talk to booksellers, they typically bemoan the crowds and the hectic atmosphere of the Expo weekend. However, this year’s keynote speaker happens to be former prez Bill Clinton who will be pushing his new — and as of this writing, not yet completed — memoir, My Life (“The president came up with the title,” says attorney Robert Barnett, who handles Clinton’s literary endeavors.) Also from this Washington Post article about the Clinton book: a first printing of 1.5 million copies and the first of what will likely be legions of sales comparisons with Hillary’s blockbuster. Hillel Italie of the AP hopes that Clinton will depart from all previous presidential memoirs by providing readers and historians with some actual insights (LINK). I would rate the chances of this as extremely slim. And David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times believes that the timing of the book’s release is purely political (LINK). Meanwhile, back in bookseller land, Book Expo attendees are bracing themselves for the media furor that is sure to accompany the book’s unveiling.

To the panoply of guilty pleasures this world has to offer, I humbly add the New York Post. I'm a Daily News man myself, but really, stuck inside a stalled subway car somewhere under the East River with nothing to read but those creepy Dr. Z acne treatment ads, who cares which paper turns up on an empty seat?When it comes to reading, tabloid journalism is the Twinky at the tip of the food pyramid, and page one is its creamy center. When confronted with the new book assembled by the staff of the NY Post, Headless Body In Topless Bar: The Best Headlines from America’s Favorite Newspaper, I couldn't help myself. Knowing that a bellyache would accompany such indulgence, I still stuffed my face.Of course, we are in the midst of a particularly salacious period of news in the City, which makes the book a timely read, er, leaf-through. Eliot Spitzer's nightmare is a headline writer's wet dream. Have a look at some recent Post fronts (March 11th's "HO NO!" is one of our favorites). All in keeping with the paper's motto, "All the news that's fit to bury beneath a mountain of hooker photos."Ah, but a good hooker story comes along but once in a while. Luckily the Post has mastered the touchstone of any good tabloid front page: the cringe-inducing pun. On the conviction of a cybersex impresario: "YOU'VE GOT JAIL!" On the closing of a Dunkin' Donuts for rodents: "UNDER MOUSE ARREST." On earth's encounter with a worrisome piece of interstellar matter: "KISS YOUR ASTEROID GOODBYE!" The CIA should consider reading these headlines to prisoners as a substitute for waterboarding.Yet, like a guy with a megaphone at an otherwise urbane cocktail party, the Post does command attention. Sometimes it even gets it just right. I like the front page from June 27, 2007: a photoshopped picture of Paris Hilton hoisted aloft on the hands of a throng in Times Square with the headline "V-D DAY! PARIS LIBERATED, BIMBOS REJOICE." Then, sometimes there's just no need to dress up a headline, such as on July 30 1985: "EATEN ALIVE! GIANT TIGERS KILL PRETTY ZOO KEEPER WHO 'LOVED ALL ANIMALS.'"A New York Magazine survey named April 15, 1983's "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR" the greatest NY Post headline of all time. As one Post editor puts it, "How do you tell a sensational story other than sensationally?" It's ironic though, that the title of this book is its climax. Sort of like the paper itself: the cover is generally the best part.

With Thanksgiving come and gone, the end of year best book lists are beginning to arrive. The New York Times list is 100 strong as usual, and despite not being particularly exclusive, the accolade is sure to grace the covers of the paperback editions of many of these books. It's good marketing really. Something about that word "Notable" (along with the Times name, of course) on the cover of a book makes browsing readers want to pick it up.The Guardian has a less conventional list up. For that list, a number of well-known writers share their favorite books of the year. Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black makes an impressive showing, cited by John Banville, AS Byatt, Philip Pullman and Zadie Smith. Mantel herself names John McGahern's Memoir and The Tyrannicide Brief by Geoffrey Robertson. The New Yorker ran a substantial piece on Mantel earlier this year. I love that the Guardian runs features like this, and I wish that there were an American paper that would do the same thing with American writers.

You may have heard about this. In October an 8 DVD set containing digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the New Yorker from February 1925 to February 2005 will hit stores (retailing for $100 - but cheaper at Amazon and other discounters). As a huge fan of the New Yorker, my eyeballs nearly popped out of my head when I first saw the NY Times story about this, but I'm trying to restrain myself. As some of you know, I'm extremely compulsive about the New Yorker, in fact it may be the only compulsion I have. I read he magazine cover to cover every week, and if my issue is late in arriving I've been known to panic. My fear is that once I got my hands on this set, I would be compelled to consume every word of it at the expense of school and work and everything else, possibly even eating and sleeping. I'm may have to put myself into forced hibernation starting in October in order to keep those DVDs from falling in to my hands. Also, normally I would find the subtitle of this collection - "Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine" - to be somewhat presumptuous, but I happen to agree with it.

While working on an essay, I found myself needing to use a word that meant “related to the study of proper names.” I knew exactly the word I wanted, because I’d just come across the same usage while re-reading David Foster Wallace’sA Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. In the essay on tennis player Michael Joyce, Wallace has this really cool throw-away paragraph about how the Association of Tennis Professionals’ weekly world rankings “constitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading.” He goes on to celebrate such names as Mahesh Bhupathi, Jonathan Venison, Cyris Suk (!), Leander Paes, Udo Riglewski, and Martin Zumpft -- and that’s just like a fifth of them. It truly is good reading.
Except it isn’t “nomological.” That was the word I went looking for, but I found this definition of it instead: “relating to or denoting certain principles, such as laws of nature, that are neither logically necessary nor theoretically explicable, but are simply taken as true.” For instance, the idea that two parallel lines will run forever and never touch is nomological, at least within Euclidean geometry.
But that really doesn’t sound like what Wallace was trying to say. It’s pretty clear he meant to say “the rankings constitute an [adjective related to the study of proper names] orgy.” A quick search indicated that the word Wallace was probably looking for was “onomastic,” which means “of or relating to the study of the history and origin of proper names.”
Where Wallace probably went wrong was in confusing the Greek nomos, meaning “law,” with onoma, meaning “name.” Consider that a variation of onoma was onuma; the switch from omicron to upsilon -- the latter of which tends to enter English as a Y -- helps form the root “-nym,” as in “synonym,” “antonym,” and “homonym.”
So the clause should read, “and the rankings constitute an onomastic orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading.”
I guess we should all take comfort in the fact that a titan like Wallace could make a mistake like this. On the other hand, it’s a testament to the late master’s genius that any of us even care.